Music for wimps: listening to four-fifths of the Scared To Get Happy compilation

"Indiepop ain't noise pollution", sing Pooh Sticks on their 1988 classic, and of course they're right. The other day I picked up four of the five CDs in the Cherry Red Scared To Get Happy mega-compilation, A Story of Indie Pop 1980-1989 (2013). Why four? Er, the charity shop only had four (50p each). Seems some indiepop spoilsport had snapped up volume one, leaving me with vols 2-5. 

So for the past few days I've been pumping out the several hours worth of music packed into these four volumes (each runs to about 78 minutes), immersing myself in songs I either already knew and even had copies of (the Razorcuts' Big Pink Cake, That Petrol Emotion's It's A Good Thing, Mighty Mighty's Is There Anyone Out There?, the Primitive's Thru The Flowers, Microdisney's Dolly, Pop Will Eat Itself's Sick Little Girl etc etc), or in some cases was hearing for the first time (Gol Gappas' Albert Parker, Rodney Allen's Circle Line, the Sea Urchins' Solace, Laugh's Take Your Time Yeah!, Whirl's Heaven Forbid ete etc). Plus, there's undoubtedly quite a bit of stuff I've totally forgotten since hearing it just the once on John Peel on any given night in 1982 or 1986 or 1989. So yeah, man, eighties indiepop. Has there ever been a music scene (or loose constellation of scenes) viewed with more condescension than this one? For example, in his Guardian review Alexis Petridis says, "there's a huge tranche of stuff that's audibly languished in obscurity for a reason". Hmm, nice one, Alexis. And what does he say about track seven on CD #3, We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It's excellent XX Sex (a record I bought when it came out)? He says this: "there's something about seeing the name We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It in close proximity to the words 'unreleased demo version' that causes a certain sinking of the spirits". For fuck's sake, man. Is this supposed to be music journalism? Or is it maybe just horrible Guardian smuggery from someone who spends a lot of his time raving about massively-hyped albums by Lily Allen and Lady Gaga? I reckon the music industry's longstanding bias against "amateurishness" or "non-seriousness" has always made a lot of eighties indiepop susceptible to these kinds of sideswipes. It's unpleasant rockist nonsense. I went to a Mighty Mighty gig in Birmingham in 1986 and it was a genuinely exciting, inspiring experience. "They're going to be bigger than the Beatles", I told my (record shop) workmates the next day - with the joke being on the Beatles, not Mighty Mighty. Ditto the Farmer's Boys and the Higsons shows I went to a few years earlier - amazing, formative gigs. And ditto the Shop Assistants, Pop Will Eat Itself and numerous other gigs from this period. Excellent music that I'd be delighted to encounter 40 years later - in fact I do encounter similarly good stuff every other month in my modern live music adventures. In Simon Reynolds' Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews And Overviews book, Nikki Sudden (of all people) says this when Reynolds asks him about the upsurge in 80s indiepop bands inspired by the Swell Maps and the Midlands DIY scene: "Orange Juice - for god's sake. Music for wimps. Like the Sarah Records label". And on the Pastels Sudden says, "It just didn't interest me at all, that direction. I had really gotten into the Stones in 1979". Depressing, really. Rockism never dies. And that has surely always been part of the reaction to the so-called "shambling" or neo-C86 bands - they were too "girlie". Fey, camp, puny - wimpish, you might say. Instead, this was precisely one of these bands' strengths. Marrying post-Jilted John (or Pete Shelley-ian) vocals with super-basic Velvet Underground-style floor-tom drumming and little hails of guitar was a winning combination in my book. As was some of the moodier, lusher (Orange Juice-inspired?) stuff put out by the Farmer's Boys, the Weather Prophets, the Railway Children and a host of others. Bring it on. A large amount of this music was championed by John Peel at the time, and I think it's fair to say that he generally knew good music when he heard it. It's not - of course - universally brilliant and there are a few duds, but overall this is a pretty great compilation packed with a lot of excellent music that stands up really well. Leaving aside numerous old faves, I particularly like the Darling Buds' If I Said, Grab Grab The Haddock's I'm Used Now, the Poppyheads' (rather strange) Dreamabout, Friends Again's Honey At The Core and the Jazz Butcher's Southern Mark Smith. I notice there's nothing by the mighty Felt (a licensing issue?) and there are other bands that could easily have been included, eg Eyeless In Gaza, Bogshed, Stump, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, the Very Things and the Three Johns, to mention just a few, but ... there you go. For me, one of the least likeable tracks on Scared To Get Happy is the Stone Roses' The Hardest Thing In The World (a MOR plodder if ever I heard one), and here's another reason why people look back with condescension on eighties indiepop: it was pop music that wasn't - unlike the Stone Roses - especially popular. Fine, though. Fuck your charts and your rock music success. Meanwhile, the Smiths are, I suppose, one of the chart-hogging indie-ish groups that haunts this compilation. A quintessental indiepop group that "broke through". And something similar could (just about) be said about The Fall. Never exactly a pop group but one imbued with plenty of independent spirit and the sort of cantankerous intelligence that aligned them with some of these indiepop bands (eg Yeah Yeah Noh or the Nightingales). But anyway, fellow wimps, that's my defence of 80s indiepop and here, to finish off, is a track from volume one of Scared To Get Happy (the one I haven't got), a nice reminder of how good this music still sounds ...